Directing, the craft of controlling the evolution of a performance out of material composed or assembled by an author. The performance may be live, as in a theatre and in some broadcasts, or it may be recorded, as in motion pictures and the majority of broadcast material. The term is also used in film, television, video, and radio to describe the shaping of material that may not involve actors and may be no more than a collection of visual or aural images.

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In the theatre there was for a time a confusion of terminology between British usage and that of the United States. The director (as distinct from an old-time actor organizing rehearsals of a play in which he himself appears) emerged during the 19th century, and, like his actors, he worked for an employer who engaged both on contract. The employer, in Britain, came to be known as the manager, while the person directing the action was known as the producer. In the United States the producer has always been the one who engages the actors and finances the production, while the artist who directs the actors and shapes the performance is known as the director. With the advent of films these terms were applied to the new industry, and the American usage eventually found its way into the London theatre. It has since been absorbed by British broadcasting and British regional theatres as well and is now applied generally, although the original British usage is found in many earlier books.

The role of the director varies a great deal, not only according to the medium in which he works but also according to whether or not he works with actors. There is always common ground between directors of drama, whatever the medium, because their success depends not only upon knowledge of the specialized form but also upon understanding of acting and human nature. Traditionally the director is responsible to the play in the same way a symphony conductor is responsible to the score. In some experimental theatres that responsibility expands to include “devising” not only the performance but also the text of a play, partly through improvisations with the actors, with or without the collaboration of an author. In all directing there is a tension between content and form. Because there are many opportunities for jugglery with technical tricks, directors can be tempted toward virtuosity at the expense of meaning. In the musical theatre, for example, directors may attempt to compensate for a weak script by dazzling the audience with mechanically sophisticated sets and elaborate lighting designs. The justification for such measures is highly debatable; in any event, the value of immediate effect must be balanced against that of enduring significance, for the two are often mutually exclusive.

Outside the Western world, the development of the director’s power originally followed the Western pattern only in the performance of Western or Western-type plays, but, more recently, non-Western directors have come to have an influence on traditional non-Western forms. Indigenous Oriental theatre, as typified by the classical theatre of China and the Nō and Kabuki theatres of Japan, is rooted in tradition; its aim is not discovery but rather the perfect presentation of what was discovered long ago. In China’s Peking opera before the Communist revolution, techniques were handed down from father to son for generations. In the Nō theatre, and to a lesser extent in the Kabuki, the positions of the performers on their acting platforms and the precise timing of their stylized gestures and vocalizations have all been fixed for centuries. In such traditions a director in the Western sense would be superfluous. But the incorporation of modern lighting and film techniques has strengthened the director’s influence generally, as can be seen in the Kabuki theatre, where such widely traveled artists as Ichikawa Ennosuke III have been controversial in Japan for their use of innovative techniques.

The director as a dominant force began to be recognized in the late decades of the 19th century. His function of guiding the actors, however, was probably being regularly practiced as early as the 4th century bc, when the Greek political orator Demosthenes is said to have been given lessons in speech by an actor named Polus. It is a reasonable assumption that, from the beginning of the existence of an acting profession, it became customary for the most experienced performers to give advice and instruction to their less experienced colleagues: actors are seldom as confident as their performances can suggest, and they need repeated confirmation that their abilities approach their self-imposed standards. Such confirmation is likely to be sought from the most respected member of the company. There is a limit, however, to the value of the help given by a fellow actor; the perspective needed to see all the possibilities of performance is usually attainable only from a viewpoint outside the cast. The importance of this perspective is well illustrated in Hamlet’s advice to the players, yet it was well over 200 years after Shakespeare’s death before acting companies officially ceased to direct themselves from within.

As Hamlet’s advice might indicate, however, directorial control has existed in some form in most theatre productions. The German practice of appointing an Intendant to run a theatre company is an early example of the function now referred to in the British theatre as artistic director, combining practical and artistic control over the work of a dramatic company. Goethe, for example, was appointed Intendant of the court theatre at Weimar in 1791; his prime concern was a formal balance of production elements, with emphasis on clarity of diction. So strong was his directorial style that the playwright Heinrich von Kleist blamed him entirely for the disastrous first production of his now classic comedy Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug) in 1808. It was not until the end of the 19th century that the Goethe-inspired formality of speech made way for greater realism.

In England the first professional director to coordinate the acting, decor, sound effects, and lighting of a production without also performing in it was probably Madame Vestris, who in 1830 controlled the Olympic Theatre in London. At her injunction, the company abandoned certain restrictive traditions of dress that had encouraged staginess and artificiality by inhibiting individuality of characterization. At the same time, she introduced varying degrees of realism into her productions, such as interior settings with real doors and windows (instead of painted ones) and sophisticated stage machinery.

By the 1870s Augustin Daly, although a leading actor in the United States, was also achieving fame for the very personal direction he was giving his company in New York City. Daly’s even more famous successor, David Belasco, started his career as an actor and concentrated on directing and play doctoring after the 1880s. He had a flair for vivid staging and is probably the best known director in American theatre history, but he had little or no influence on acting and left behind him no tradition. It was left to an eccentric amateur in Germany to establish an acting company that was eventually to lead to profound changes in theatrical methods throughout the Western world. The Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s actors aimed to achieve a psychological depth of characterization that was quite new for playgoers, and the company also paid meticulous attention to detail in their settings and in the way they managed crowd scenes. In their second tour of Russia in 1890 they had a great influence on Konstantin Stanislavsky, who was beginning to think along the same lines. A few years later, Stanislavsky and V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, who had by then established the Moscow Art Theatre, learned further from Anton Chekhov, a playwright so concerned with conveying the inner realities of human nature that his works could not be acted successfully except through entirely new directorial methods.

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia, France, England, and Germany there appeared realistic writers whose plays also called for deeper and subtler acting; thus, a “theatre of significance” grew up alongside the “theatre of entertainment” in those countries, leading to the emergence of original and creative directors. Prominent among these were Harley Granville-Barker in England and André Antoine in France. By the turn of the century nearly all professional productions presented in Europe and America were directed by professional directors—though another two decades were to pass before directors were universally acknowledged in theatre programs.

20th-century directing

The craft of the theatre director has become a matter of considerable diversity and complexity in the 20th century. The responsibilities include the style of acting in particular productions, the interpretation of the play, the guidance of the actors in exploring their parts, and sometimes, though controversially, a complete control over their performances. The director also exercises overlordship in matters of decor, costuming, and lighting (sometimes he functions himself in these three areas, but union restrictions in certain countries, notably in the United States, prevent this in commercial productions, even though they allow him the final word). Incidental music, if any, and choreography in a musical play are also under his control, as are visual and sound effects.

These, the director’s theatrical instruments, are more numerous and sophisticated than they were in the 19th century. Moreover, the actor is now much more aware of the techniques of voice and speech, so that the director needs at least a theoretical knowledge of how a performer achieves the fully expressive tonal octave of which he should be capable. He must also be sensitive to the rhythms and dynamics of speech and how these are affected by emotion and situation; through the contrasts resulting from these, he can create in performance a pattern that appeals both to the mind and to the senses. A great deal depends, too, upon the composition of his stage pictures, which must never remain static for long, and on how and when his actors move. The function of a modern director might be summed up like this: he creates a succession of focal points that must irresistibly attract the attention of the audience; then, through the quality of the acting, he tries to ensure that these focal points are as relevant as he can possibly make them.

Directorial styles

The backgrounds of individual directors—some have been actors, some stage managers, some have entered the theatre from other professions—have shaped their styles. Yet style in a director is difficult to gauge. It is much affected by material, and the director may be labeled by facile critics according to the kind of production with which he has been most obviously associated. Max Reinhardt was famous in two continents largely because of The Miracle (premiered 1911), a play of no great distinction that owed much of its success to his spectacular treatment. His less publicized interpretation of Luigi Pirandello’sSix Characters in Search of an Author, a psychological play requiring no scenery, was, however, at least as typical of this distinguished Viennese director. The name of Stanislavsky is inextricably linked with that of Chekhov, and he is commonly believed to have been the perfect interpreter of the great Russian playwright. The belief is due less to a full understanding of Chekhov on the part of Stanislavsky than to the fact that Stanislavsky wrote repeatedly and at length about the kind of acting that Chekhov’s plays needed. We know from the former’s prompt script of The Seagull and from Chekhov’s letters that the two men differed over some fundamental questions of artistic judgment. Chekhov’s letters and Nemirovich-Danchenko’s last production of The Three Sisters (1938), which continued to be performed for more than 20 years, suggest that the Russian playwright was far better served by Stanislavsky’s more reticent partner.

The success with which a director has carried out his task is not easily assessed by either playgoer or critic. Both can be deceived by exciting scenery or bold theatrical effects into overvaluing these tools of the trade and forgetting their purpose, which is to ensure an imaginative interpretation of what the author has written. Louis Jouvet, the distinguished 20th-century French director, once wrote:

There are two kinds of director: the one who expects everything from the play, for whom the play itself is essential; and the one who expects nothing except from himself.

There is much truth in this statement, provided the extremes are not taken too seriously.

Peter Brook of the Royal Shakespeare Company seemed to expect little from the author when he did an outstanding production of Titus Andronicus in 1955. If he had put greater faith in Shakespeare and had not eked out the script with a multitude of happy theatrical inventions, the public would have been the poorer. On the other hand, Brook’s treatments of Shakespeare’s great plays have not invariably been happy; these do not need eking out and rather seem to ask that director and actors build a testament to Shakespeare’s poetry and grandeur.

Possibly the best directors cannot be made to fit into categories. Tyrone Guthrie (1900–71), in 45 years of directing every kind of play, progressed from an almost perverse disregard of authors to an ungrudging respect for them. His work ranged from Shakespeare to Aeschylus and took in Gilbert and Sullivan on the way. In viewing the totality of Guthrie’s work, what emerges most strongly is an irrepressible comedic originality. The ability to discern comedy inevitably lurking behind the obvious sorrows of existence is evidence of more than maturity; it also demonstrates the director’s knowledge of dramatic ways and means, for the face behind the mask is in the best writers always discernible, and in the less good it is still there, to be forcibly exposed. The discovery of the comedy that is latent gives a highlight to good dialogue and the impression at least of an extra dimension to any writing that might otherwise seem featureless.

Diversity is demanded of a director working in the traditional repertoire of the European classical theatre. Trevor Nunn of the Royal Shakespeare Company may have achieved his most memorable Shakespearean production with his intense, small-scale Macbeth (1976), a production designed for fewer than 200 spectators, but he was no less successful in 1980 in staging an epic dramatization of Charles Dickens’ novel Nicholas Nickleby, which unfolded its story for more than eight hours. It was after demonstrating his mastery of classical theatre—including a production in 1978 of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, notable for its precise observation of detail and its melancholy humour—that Nunn went on to direct major commercial productions in the musical theatre, including Andrew Lloyd Webber’sCats (1981) and the roller-skating spectacle Starlight Express (1984). Laurence Olivier, the first director of the National Theatre of Great Britain, became known for his command of a wide range of theatrical styles and was particularly remarkable for his capacity to direct a play in which he also acted the leading part. This is a rare talent. It is extremely difficult for the actor-director to maintain creative objectivity while becoming immersed at the same time in his own personal creation.

Ingmar Bergman, though best known internationally for his work in film, has had considerable impact in Europe with his stage productions, not only in his native Sweden but also in Germany. He is a master of the art of drama in a multitude of forms and techniques and among the most profound directors of modern times. His emendations to the classic plays of Europe and of his fellow Scandinavians are respectfully regarded even by those who do not agree with them. Part of the success of Bergman’s productions is due to his handling of actors and the admiration that he inspires in them. Consequently, the best performers throughout the world have regarded an invitation to work for him as an accolade.

Conditions in the American theatre have not encouraged such diversity, and the best known stage directors in the United States have tended to be closely associated with particular writers or kinds of writing. Thus, Elia Kazan remains identified with the early great successes of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller; Mike Nichols with sophisticated comedy; José Quintero with productions of Eugene O’Neill; and Harold Prince with Broadway musicals.

In the second half of the 20th century the chief development in the art of directing has been a strengthening of international influences. Ariane Mnouchkine, for example, directing her own company in Paris, did not hesitate to present plays by Shakespeare as Oriental spectacles, borrowing most successfully from the Kabuki theatre. Where research into the art of acting has been a major interest of directors, there have been surprising convergences from very different traditions, so that when Suzuki Tadashi’s Waseda company from Tokyo arrived in Europe in 1972, it found itself being compared in its intense physicality to Jerzy Grotowski’sPolish Laboratory Theatre from Wrocław in Poland, though the two companies had been founded independently in the early 1960s.

Although aware of the more exotic techniques available to a theatre director in the late 20th century, Peter Stein in West Berlin concentrated in the 1970s and ’80s on some particularly fruitful European conventions, including elaborating the traditions of historical research established by the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen’s company and Stanislavsky in Russia. Stein’s work with West Berlin’s Schaubühne company included group visits to Greece for research on Greek tragedy and to England to prepare for productions of Shakespeare; on those occasions the research itself was dramatized by Stein and the company into complementary performances aimed at helping to illuminate the respective plays. Their work represents perhaps the most thorough synthesis of the directorial ideas of such diverse theorists as Bertolt Brecht—advocating a cool rationality in the theatre—and Antonin Artaud—proposing a visceral “theatre of cruelty.”

National conditions affect directorial vitality. The vast size of the United States and its hesitation to accept the cultural asset of professional drama, except in a very few cities, polarized the American theatre in the post-World War II period. At one extreme Broadway dominated—highly professionalized but dependent upon the limited vision of speculative investors and demanding little of imaginative directors. Its intellectual sterility encouraged the opposite extreme of Off Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway, where there was both experiment and imagination but also unfortunately much professional incompetence.

A promising development was the establishment of regional theatres in and around the bigger centres of population. Pioneering theatres such as the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., and the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas, provided forums not only for a wide repertoire of world theatre but also for new playwrights and directors. As Broadway continued its decline, the regional theatres continued to grow in importance; “schools” of acting, directing, and playwriting emerged in Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities.

The scarcity of good directors poses the question as to why modern dramatists should not direct their own plays, as Racine and Molière did in the 17th century. Contemporary writers seem more introverted and tend to lack both the stagecraft and the desire to inspire a company of actors. The contemporary English playwright Harold Pinter is a notable exception. An actor himself, he is as good a director as he is a playwright. In Italy, Pirandello established himself as a director uniquely able to realize his own advanced ideas of drama, rather as Brecht later did with the Berliner Ensemble. Dario Fo followed in that tradition, bringing to his own political comedies such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970) the fruits of his studies of the traditional Italian commedia dell’arte. Other modern exceptions have included Harley Granville-Barker and George Bernard Shaw, who saw to it that their plays were performed as they wished them to be. Moreover, they both had a marked effect on English acting and laid the foundations for its 20th-century preeminence in the English-speaking world. Shaw, in particular, inspired many a young performer with the understanding of stress, cadence, and rhythm, and even today his stage directions (with most dramatists these are no more than generalized indications and are useless for practical purposes) are models of instructive lucidity from which a director departs only at his peril.

The director’s relation to the actor

A proper comprehension of and respect for the actor is indispensable to direction of the highest quality, since the acting in the theatre greatly outweighs such elements as settings, lighting effects, and visual ideas. On this point Jouvet and Shaw both have written aptly. The former said: “The profession of director suffers from the disease of immodesty.” And the latter, hardly famous for underestimating his own abilities, advised in The Art of Rehearsal:

Do not forget that though at the first rehearsal you will know more about the parts than the actors, at the last rehearsal they ought to know more about them than you, and therefore have something to teach you about them.

If a director has antagonized his actors and has not, on the contrary, stimulated their imagination so that they have become confidently creative, then failure for him is almost inevitable.

The task is difficult. To communicate with any particular group of actors requires the most balanced judgment. Unlike the orchestral conductor, to whose aims the theatrical director’s are closely analogous, he cannot control actual performance. Neither can he, except rarely, tell his actors precisely and in every detail exactly what he wants of them. The minutiae are solely their concern, just as in a concerto they are the concern of the soloist (all actors, basically, are soloists, and their creative powers generally are inhibited by drill sergeant methods). Actors need at least the illusion that their own imaginations have full freedom. To direct by guile is therefore most often the key to success.

The rehearsal process

The director’s efforts are naturally affected by the length of time given to rehearsals. These vary according to economic pressures, national customs, and union rules. In some countries, notably the United States, the actors’ union has used its powers to escalate salaries and limit working hours. The American director is consequently hard put to find enough time to achieve the depth and polish to which he aspires. His limit may stretch to four weeks on Broadway and to a mere one or two weeks outside New York City. In many parts of Europe, subsidized theatre has been long established, and where this is so conditions are better. Rehearsals can last five or six weeks and may even extend into months. Despite unionization, the length of the rehearsal day for serious drama in Great Britain is left up to the artists themselves. The working day is long and four weeks is usually considered enough time, but it is not uncommon for productions at the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company to begin through workshops months before the opening performance.

Directorial capacities for patience and self-control usually are put to the test in the last few days of rehearsal. For weeks the company has worked together, and it should have at last reached a result that seems very close to fruitful consummation. The actors may have rehearsed, as in many European countries, on the very stage on which they are to perform. If they are working in Great Britain or the United States, they may have worked in nothing better than a room. In either case, a time must come when scenery, probably incomplete, appears and almost inevitably looks unlike what was expected. The actors have scarcely adjusted themselves to this when the lighting has to be set and cues established. Suddenly, the marvelous magic world that the artists have built and come to inhabit as their own is shattered: the technicians have arrived. There is retrogression and despondency as door handles come off in the actors’ hands and complicated speeches written to be spoken to the dying rays of a setting sun are repeated over and over again while the sun obstinately refuses to set. At this point the entire production must be reborn and all its disparate components brought together in rhythm and harmony. The best served artists are those in countries where subsidy permits extended technical rehearsals. In Germany, eastern Europe, and Scandinavia, artists and technicians may be given a week or more in which they can work together onstage before the first dress rehearsal. The allotted time in the United States may be less than 24 hours.

Casting

There is a crucial responsibility at the other end of the production schedule, before rehearsals even begin. It is the casting process, which is often regarded as an art in itself. An error in casting can be fatal, no matter how much imagination, hard work, and money have been invested in the production. The responsibility should always be the director’s, but it is often usurped by the producer in theatres oriented toward the box office, and it has become a frequent habit with the latter to seek either the “right type” for the part or a well-publicized “name,” irrespective of the ability to act. The wisest casting often works by opposites, so that a hot-blooded character is best played by an actor whose own personality is cool and objective. Then, as a director of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London observed:

Two contrary elements fuse harmonically to create a character in depth [who] becomes “real” precisely because he is made up of opposite elements in the same way as people are in life.

Casting, the planning of schedules, and the coordination of differing streams of creativity become more complex in production outside the field of straight drama. The rehearsal period in musicals, for example, is longer, and the strain is greater not so much on the director’s artistic resources (for he has a great many helpers) but on his powers of leadership. The presence of a choreographer, with a conductor and an orchestra, the cost of which in Britain and the United States prohibits the use of musicians before the dress rehearsal, in addition to a heightened emphasis on lighting and visual effects, all contribute to creating a vast potential for discord. The director must resolve these and even turn them to advantage. All large-scale entertainments, including most modern musicals, reach the ears of the audience by means of electronic amplification. This introduces the alien element of the sound engineer, who is likely to be more technocrat than artist and may require tactful handling.

Clearly, the director of live entertainment needs to be a person of many qualities, some of which are in conflict with one another. Of all the necessary characteristics, patience perhaps is one of the most important. Unlike directors in other media, the theatre director is both artist and maintenance supervisor: in a long run it is his duty to watch the show at least every two or three weeks, thus ensuring that all that happens on the stage continues to be true to the original intentions. Such recurring watchfulness calls for critical balance and powers of endurance not easily found.

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A play’s opening night or a movie premiere is the culmination of work by many people, from actors and playwrights to lighting and costume designers. Directing is the management of that technical and creative joint effort.

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